A peculiar experience

Last Saturday Honey and I had to go eat dinner with Honey's parents and some of their friends from their church to say Thank you to them for coming to our wedding and give us such generous gifts. I thought it was going to be a regular Chinese dinner, but it didn't start that way... They brought an electric piano to a dinner, which was my first clue. Not that I still understood exactly what was coming. 

Happy people singing hymns. 

One after one the guests started to arrive. They all greeted us and congratulated us for the wedding. A couple showed up with hymn books. Hmmm... I was a bit surprised, what was going to happen? As the last person showed up they all sat down, passed out the hymn books, Honey's mom sat down by the electric piano and they started to sing hymns, starting from hymn 1 (there are like 300+ hymns in that book)! And they sang, and sang, even some solo singing, some times a Capella.  They kept singing song after song in the hymn book, skipped a few songs here and there, and sang for about an hour. It was surreal, and I didn't know what to do, or what to think. After a while I thought it was cute, they all seemed so happy. They were all pretty good singers, and they knew every freaking hymn in that book! Pretty impressive. 

I asked Honey if this was something they did on a regular occasion, that they met to sing hymns, but he said No. It turned out that this group of people used to be the church choir, and even if it is many many years ago they still liked singing together. 

And if you want to know, there was a dinner after singing, twelve course traditional Chinese food. :)

Hymn book in Hong Kong.